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David MacFarland of the WDNR, quoted elsewhere: “Generally, the wolf population increased at a rate of 20 percent or more in the 1990s, and at a 10 to 12 percent rate in 2000s,” said David MacFarland, DNR carnivore specialist. “Though the recent count suggests that the wolf population has stabilized or showed a slight decline, science suggests that human-caused wolf mortalities must reach close to 30 percent before wolf populations are reduced. The total known human-caused mortalities of wolves in 2012 amounted to 28 percent of the previous winter’s count, but some level of undetected mortality likely occurred.”.

Since the population does not increase without the hunt, what MacFarland is saying is that you have to kill off about a third of the wolf population to make up for the fact that you are destroying the wolves' natural population controls, making their packs bigger and driving out or killing other wolves from large territories, and running them exactly backwards.

Then, when you have killed off all the wolves the wolves themselves would have removed, additional wolves killed starts reducing the population. In the process you also drive the number of packs up by opening new niches for pairs to move in and breed, the number of pups whelped in spring driven up exactly as the number of packs, and the food needed to those pups also raised in the same proportion.

Of course, you trash any attempts of the wolf packs to build their own social structure every year in the process when you reach that level of the "harvest" scything out the pack members every year. This is discounted as unimportant.